Copyright and Fair Use

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A healthy copyright system must balance the need to provide strong economic incentives through exclusive rights with the need to protect important public interests like free speech and expression. Fair use is foundational to that balance. It's role is to prevent copyright from stifling the creativity it is supposed to foster, and from imposing other burdens that would inhibit rather than promote the creation and spread of knowledge and learning.

The Fair Use Project (FUP) was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom and protect important public rights. It is the only organization in the country dedicated specifically to providing free and comprehensive legal representation to authors, filmmakers, artists, musicians and other content creators who face unmerited copyright claims, or other improper restrictions on their expressive interests. The FUP has litigated important cases across the country, and in the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked with scores of filmmakers and other content creators to secure the unimpeded release of their work.

Brett Frischmann’s expertise is in intellectual property and internet law. After clerking for the Honorable Fred I. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practicing at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, DC, he joined the Loyola University Chicago law faculty in 2002. He has held visiting appointments at Cornell and Fordham. Read more » about Brett Frischmann

Lauren is an experienced attorney, frequent speaker and start-up advisor who has worked in the field of Internet law and policy since 1995. She is the founder of BlurryEdge Strategies, a legal and strategy consulting firm located in San Francisco that advises technology companies and investors on cutting-edge legal issues. Read more » about Lauren Gelman

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Representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren joined eight other members of Congress in urging the House Judiciary Committee to reject SOPA because it would cause "serious and long term damage to the technology industry" -- "one of the few bright spots in our economy."

Nine of the leading internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga also sent a letter to key member of the Committee explaining that SOPA would jeopardize protections that "have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry’s growth and success."

Last July, I signed on to a letter from more than 100 law professors urging Congress to reject the PROTECT-IP Act. A new version of that bill -- referred to as both the E-PARASITE Act and SOPA -- was introduced in the House last week, and it is even more dangerous than its predecessors. See David Post's critique at the Volokh Conspiracy. Hear Mark Lemley's discussion on APM's Marketplace. Once you do, you'll probably ask "what can I do to stop this?" You can start by signing this petition at whitehouse.gov, and using this tool from EFF to write your Senator and Congressperson -- wherever you live. Read more » about David Post: Occupy Hollywood (and stop SOPA)

Last March, a Manhattan district court issued an order declaring thirty paintings by the renowned artist Richard Prince unlawful, and issued an injunction that led to the seizure and potential destruction of his work. It did so because Prince’s paintings used images of Rastafarians that Prince found in Patrick Cariou’s book, Yes, Rasta. Yesterday, we filed an amicus brief on behalf of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts urging the Second Circuit to reverse that decision. (The Warhol Foundation's press release is here.)

Days after anti-piracy legislation stalled in Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice coordinated an unprecedented raid on the Hong Kong-based website Megaupload.com. New Zealand law enforcement agents swooped in by helicopter to arrest founder Kim Dotcom at his home outside of Auckland, and seized millions of dollars worth of art, vehicles and real estate. Six other Megaupload employees were also arrested. Meanwhile, the Justice Department seized Megaupload's domain names and the data of at least 50 million users worldwide. Read more » about Megaupload.com Indictment Leaves Everyone Guessing - Part 1

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive. Read more » about The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture

It is now received wisdom that a properly functioning democracy requires transparency and accountability — information shared with the public that allows the public to know what its government is doing. It is equally uncontroversial to say that social media allows for an unprecedented amount of informal but structured dissemination and analysis of information. Despite these two basic points, U.S. freedom of information law has failed to harness the power of these new social media networks and, more importantly, formats in a way that amplifies public knowledge of government information. Read more » about The Social Layer of Freedom of Information Law

This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the experimental economics of intellectual property. In earlier work, we have experimentally studied the ways in which creators assign monetary value to the things that they create. That research has suggested that creators are subject to a systematic bias that leads them to overvalue their work.Read more » about Valuing Attribution and Publication in Intellectual Property

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We filed an amicus brief on behalf of a group of library associations and others asking the Second Circuit to reverse a lower court’s injunction of the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye an unauthorized story based on J.D. Salinger’s in Catcher In The Rye. Read more » about Salinger v. Colting, et al.

We filed an amicus brief in the Federal Circuit on behalf of the Warhol Foundation and Warhol Museum, contemporary artists and law professors in support of the U.S. Postal Service, urging affirmance of the district court’s finding of fair use. Read more » about Gaylord v. U.S. Postal Service

Yoko Ono and EMI sued a documentary filmmaker for using a short clip from the John Lennon song “Imagine” as part of a critique of the lyrics of the song. We defended the filmmaker and successfully argued that the use of the copyrighted song was fair use. Read more » about Lennon v. Premise Media

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"But CrossFit could face an uphill battle proving that the videos violate their copyright, said Julie Ahrens, director of Copyright and Fair Use at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Commentary and criticism enjoys legal protection as free speech—known as “fair use”—even if that might mean using a copy of someone else’s video. It depends partly on whether someone is adding to the video to give it a different meaning, or if, for example, they were just copying it to sell their own workout video.Read more » about CrossFit's Sour Sense of Humor

"Ben Depoorter, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, said that there is no U.S. government enforcement agency tasked with policing copyright infringement; the law is designed primarily for private civil lawsuits, like the ones that Malibu Media has filed. But some judges may question whether the company’s motive is to make money or to deter piracy, he said: “If you’re filing three lawsuits per day, that very much looks like an abusive model. Some judges may say this looks like a business model. On the other hand, infringement is infringement.”"Read more » about The Biggest Filer of Copyright Lawsuits? This Erotica Web Site

"Amazon hasn't replied to questions from El Reg as to what use this patent could be put to, so we consulted the Electronic Frontier Foundation's staff attorney Daniel Nazer, who in March was appointed to the organization's "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents" chair.